The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (25 page)

Henry took Luke and the dogs out to the old barn. There were pictures of that, too, taken back when it had been Henry’s home. Henry had called them up on the ceiling and they had all looked at them, even the dogs. It was hardly a first-date activity, to share your distant past this way, though he’d done it with Bobby, the two of them sitting in an overpriced café in Cambridge with their phones on the table, excitedly trading pictures of their dead brothers and fathers. That had felt like showing each other their scars, part of the process of recognition by which they came independently to understand that, while it was probably too early to say they were meant for each other, they were at least very lucky to have collided. It was a less intimate revelation to show pictures of himself at five years old, naked except for a little cowboy hat and boots, to a man he had fucked three times in the twelve hours he had known him, but it was still a startling bit of progress. He hadn’t been interested in that sort of thing—the moving on that his friends and shrinks and Bobby himself had encouraged him to do—largely because it seemed both impossible and unnecessary. Trying to not be in love with Bobby was like trying to not be gay anymore, or like annulling the law of gravity by personal decree. It was ridiculous to try, and anyway gayness and gravity, for whatever sadness or limitation they might generate, felt right. Henry
still wasn’t interested in moving on, but there was something about his pending encounter with the square that made it feel like this was something else, similar in form but not in substance to getting over it at last, since he was about to make a permanent attestation to his devotion to Bobby, and to his objection to the end of their relationship.

“This is okay,” he said to Hobart, the only other one of the four still awake after the slide show. Luke and his dog had fallen asleep before it finished, and now the man’s head was on Henry’s chest. “This is okay,” Henry said again, staring down his nose at Luke’s face. He was doing a whistling sort of snore, in through the nose, out through the mouth. “I’m not making out with your dog,” Henry said quietly. “He’s throwing up into my mouth.” He wondered why he couldn’t have thought to say that two days before. Hobart crawled up the bed and added his head to the empty side of Henry’s chest. It was a little hard to breathe, but he still fell asleep that way.

The barn was in as much of a state of ruin as the law would allow. No one had lived there for five years, and no one sanely inclined to keep it up had lived there for fifteen. A friend of his father’s, a crazy cat lady who kept birds instead of cats, had moved in after his father had died, and after she died Henry had left it empty, never visiting and only paying now and then to have it painted when the nearest neighbor complained that it was starting to look shabby in a way that was no longer picturesque. All the nearest neighbors were eventually eaten up by incorporation, and there were mansions all around now in the near distance, but Henry had never sold the place in spite of offers that grew both more generous and more threatening. He’d left it to Bobby with instructions never to sell, which he probably wouldn’t—Bobby was not exactly a friend of incorporation—but who knew. Maybe he and the Brazilian would want to make another baby together, and Bobby’s grandma had only been good for one.

…

“You used to live here?” Luke asked in the morning. “All the time?”

“All the time,” Henry said. “It’s why my manners are so atrocious.” They were standing in what remained of the living room. A pair of squirrels were staring at them from a rafter above. The dogs were staring back. “It was fine,” Henry said. “It was great, actually. As much as I remember. It doesn’t have anything to do with … it.”

“Yeah. Mine neither,” Luke said. They had started talking about the square during breakfast. Henry wasn’t the one to bring it up. Out of nowhere and all of a sudden Luke had asked him what he was going to wear when he went through. “Shorts,” Henry had said, not thinking to deny it, or even ask how Luke knew he was a Square.

“I brought a parka,” Luke said.

“Because you think it will be cold?” Henry asked.

“Because I like the parka,” Luke said. “It’s my favorite piece of clothing. It’s puffy but not too puffy.” A silence followed, not entirely awkward. They were eating in the room, on the bed, and had just moved the plates to the floor for the dogs to finish up. Henry was still trying to decide what to say next when Luke reached over for his cock, and what followed felt like a sort of conversation. Henry had always thought that having someone’s cock in your mouth ought to provide you with some kind of insight on them, though this hadn’t ever been the case. Staring into someone’s eyes while he pounded on their ass made him feel infinitely remote from them, except of course for Bobby, and maybe it was the extraordinary intimacy he had achieved doing such things with Bobby that spoiled it with everyone else. But there was something revealing in the exchange between him and Luke. Luke was holding on to him too tightly, and he was holding on too tightly to Luke, and Henry thought he heard notes of agonized sadness in both their voices when they cried out at each other as they
came. By the end of it Henry felt as if they had communicated any number of wordless secrets, and that he had a deep, dumb understanding of why Luke was going through the square, and felt sure that Luke felt the same way, and it seemed all of a piece with the whole process that it would fuck things up by asking if this was true.

“I was such a happy kid,” Luke said. “Not one single thing about my childhood was fucked up. I always wanted to put that on my gravestone, if I was going to have a gravestone.”

“Mine would say …” Henry started, and then thought better of it.

“What?” He had been going to say,
He made bad choices
.

“
Poodle,
” he said. “Just,
Poodle
. And let people wonder what that meant, except it wouldn’t mean anything.” Luke put an arm around him.

“I like you,” he said. “I
like
you.” The way he stressed the
like
made it sound as if he hadn’t liked anybody for a while.

“I like you, too,” Henry said, feeling stupid and exalted at the same time. It changed nothing, to like somebody. It didn’t change anything at all about why he was here, or what he was going to do. He could like somebody, and say good-bye to liking somebody, in the same way he was saying good-bye to ice cream and gingersnaps and blow jobs and the soft fur on the top of Hobart’s head. It didn’t change the past, or alter any of the choices he had made, or make him into a different person. It didn’t change the fact that it was too late to do anything but proceed quietly and calmly through the square.

The dogs were taking turns leaping and barking uselessly at the squirrels. “I l
ike
you,” Henry said again, trying to put the same charming emphasis on the word that Luke had, but it only came out funny, his voice breaking like he was thirteen, or like he was much sadder or more overcome than he actually was. Luke gathered him closer in his arms, and pressed his beard against Henry’s
beard, and Henry was sure this man was going to say something that would be awkward and delightful and terrifying, but after five minutes of squeezing him and rubbing their faces together but never quite kissing all he said was “You’re
cuddly.
”

Some days I’m INTO
, Martha wrote,
and some days I’m THROUGH. But I’m never not going
. Everybody had those days, when the prospect of going into the square, with no expectation of anything but oblivion on the other side, was more appealing than the prospect of passing through it to discover a new world where pain was felt less acutely, or less urgently, or even just differently, although most people liked to pretend that they were only interested in the latter destination. These were not suicides, after all. But how many people would pass through, Henry wondered, if it were in fact a guaranteed passage to Narnia? He wasn’t sure that nuzzling with Aslan would make him any less troubled over Bobby, or that topping Mr. Tumnus’s hairy bottom would dispel any unwanted memories. Living beyond Bobby, beyond the pain and delight of remembering him, beyond the terrible ironies of their failed almost marriage, required something more than the promise of happiness or relief. It could only be done someplace farther away than Narnia, and maybe even someplace farther away than death, though death, according to the deep illogic that had governed all Henry’s actions since he and Bobby had broken up beyond any hope of reconciling, was at least a step in the right direction. When he had made his drunken attempt to hang himself all Henry had been thinking about was getting away from Bobby, from loving him and hurting over him and from the guilt of having hurt him, but when he actually settled his weight down on the telephone cord around his neck and let himself begin to be suspended by it, some monstrously naive part of him felt like he was accelerating back toward his old lover. Killing himself, as he tried to kill himself, felt like both a way forward and a way back.

He blacked out ever so gently—he’d chosen to hang himself for the sheer painless ease of it—and he felt sure that he was traveling, felt a thrill at having made what seemed like a reportable discovery, that death was falling. This seemed like tremendously important news, the sort of thing that might have validated his short-lived and undistinguished scientific career. He thought how sad it was that he wasn’t going to be able to tell Bobby—It’s all right after all, he would have said, that our brothers are dead and our fathers are dead because death is only
falling
. And at the same time he thought, I’ll tell him when I see him.

He woke up with a terrible headache, lying among the shoes on his closet floor, all his neatly pressed work clothes on top of him and splinters from the broken closet bar in his hair. He spent the night there because it seemed like this was the place he had been heading all his life, and the dreary destined comfort of it gave him the best night’s sleep he’d had in months. When he woke again all the desperate intoxications of the night before had worn off, and he only felt pathetic, failed suicides being the worst sort of losers in anybody’s book, his own included. He stayed in there through the morning—he’d wet himself as he lay unconscious, and did it again without much hesitation—feeling afraid to go out into what seemed now like a different world. It was early evening before growing boredom forced him to look at his phone. He’d sent a text to Bobby—
I’m so sorry
—and received no reply.

Henry went walking at dusk with Luke along the fence around the station where the square was housed. The dogs went quietly before them, sniffing at the grass that poked around the chain link but neither one ever finding a place to pee. When they came into view of the concrete shed, Dan barked softly at it, but Hobart only lay down and appeared to go to sleep. Henry and Luke stared silently for a while, holding hands.

“How did you know I came to Nantucket for this?” Henry asked.

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Same way I knew you were gay, I guess. Squaredar.”

“Huh,” Henry said. “I didn’t know with you until you asked. And then I knew.” This seemed like a terribly lame thing to say. He was reminded of all his late conversations with Bobby, before Bobby had ended their long fruitless talk about whether or not they should try being together again by marrying the Brazilian, when hapless unrequited love of the man had kept Henry from making a single articulate point.

“And you didn’t know I was gay until I came in your mouth.”

“I’m slow,” Henry said. “But that doesn’t make you gay. Hundreds and hundreds of straight guys have come in my mouth. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.” It suddenly occurred to him that holding hands they would be too big to fit through the square.

They were quiet for a little while, until Luke heaved a big sigh and said, “There it is.” His tone was somehow both reverential and disappointed.

“You couldn’t have thought it would be bigger,” Henry said. “Everybody knows how big it is.”

“No. I just thought I would feel something … different. If I close my eyes I can’t even tell it’s there.”

“Well,” Henry said. “Maybe it’s just a hole.”

Luke shook his head. “Look,” he said, and pointed. Someone was approaching the shed. Luke raised a little pair of binoculars to his eyes and made an odd noise, a grunt and a laugh and also something sadder than either of those noises, and handed the glasses to Henry. It was a woman wearing a short, sparkling dress. “I don’t think it’s very practical to go through in heels,” Henry said.

“Makes it difficult to leap properly,” Luke said. “She’s probably just going to fall in, which isn’t right at all.”

Henry put the binoculars down. “Why do you think she’s going?”

Luke shrugged. “ ’Cause she’s too pretty for this world.” He took the glasses back from Henry, who gave them up gladly, not wanting to watch her pass through the door.

“Let’s go,” Henry said.

“Hold on,” Luke said, still watching. “She’s stranded here from another dimension, and thinks this might be the way back.”

“Or some dead person told her to do it,” Henry said. “To be with them again. Let’s go.”

“Just a minute,” Luke said, and lifted his head like Hobart sniffing at the harbor smells, cocking his head and listening. Henry turned and walked away, whistling for Hobart to follow him, but the dogs stayed together, sitting next to Luke, all of them sniffing and listening. Henry kept walking, and shortly they all came bounding up behind him. Luke caught him around the shoulders and pulled him close. “She’s gone,” he said matter-of-factly. “Did you feel it?”

All through dinner Henry wanted to ask the question that he knew he shouldn’t, the question that probably didn’t need to be answered, and the one that he felt intermittently sure would be ruinous to ask. But it wasn’t until later, as Luke lay sweating on top of him, that he couldn’t resist anymore, and he finally asked it. “How come?” he said into Luke’s shoulder.

“What?”

“How come you’re going through?”

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Why are you going?”